Conquered Kingdoms  (Link)

 

Conquered Kingdoms is a little-known, fantasy-medieval, turn-based strategy game from the old days of 1992. It basically revolves around getting a massive army of dragons and destroying your opponent's forces, which probably consist of a "variety" of units, because they're some sort of stupid idiot and don't know that dragons have REAL ULTIMATE POWER.

A non-Photoshopped dragon of completely unsuspicious color scheme unleashes fiery wrath on a door-to-door salesman that attempts to overcharge for low-quality goods in the game's intro. BTW, black dragons are the best.

Despite the game's EGA graphics and PC-speaker sound, the menus and landscape you see while plotting draconic takeover are very robust and informational. All the units look really cool (except for the Rog, but nobody cares about those) and have some neat little attack animations, too. Heck, this is more than you can say for some games made nowadays. I'm especially talking about games that, for some foolish reason, do not include dragons in any form.

As stated, the genre of the game is turn-based strategy, and your goal is to capture and hold towns and castles. More specifically, each town is worth a certain amount of Victory Points (VPs) per turn that it is in a player's possession. These points per turn range from 100 to over 1000. Holding a single castle will net 300 VPs per turn, while two castles will get 600 VPs per turn, per castle, leading on to 900 per turn/castle if you control three, and so on. Both are important to win the game, since just defeating enemy units earns no points, though it certainly helps.

Any research or citybuilding is forgotten in exchange for raw tactics and combat, which functions on a simultanious-attack system (like Magic: The Gathering) so it is important to know your enemies, which have a variety of attack power, defense power, and cost to place or recruit:

Knights carry a broadsword and shield, giving them high damage and exceptional defense, especially against archers. They also have an annoying tendency to do high damage to dragons.
Swordsmen are either peasants, idiots, or idiot peasants given dull swords and forced into battle for barely any pay. Peasants exist to lay claim to towns and be burninated, and if I'm not mistaken, these guys are highly flammable.
Cavalry are mounted knights with much of the same protection and attack power, minus the shield and plus a weakness against enemies with polearms.
Archers are inexpensive and use bows to attack from close or long range. They, like knights, do high damage against dragons, though they take high damage in return from most units, relying on fighting from range.
Lancers are as inexpensive as swordsmen, and only maginally more useful. They are slightly more mobile than their sword-wielding counterparts, and can kill cavalry without taking any damage in return, but they are also similarly useless against dragons.
Catapults have a longer range than archers, though they sacrifice a melee attack and any sort of armor for it. Their attack is strong, except against fast-moving cavalry, but they are only minimally effective against dragons.
Royalty have the attack of knights, but with a few bonuses. They have more health, can heal themselves and nearby units when not in immediate danger, and help take over enemy-controlled castles. You get a limited number for free, and if the royalty dies, though, it's really no big deal even though the game scolds you for allowing your king to be killed in action.
Ships function mostly as transports, since they do little attack damage except against other ships. Archers hitching a ride can still fire, so dragons should engage in melee rather than from range.
Spies completely lack combat power, but they have other specialties to make up for it. Mostly, they just move faster than any other unit, remain invisible unless bumped into, can see twice as far as anything else, and can assassinate royalty, catapults, and phantoms in a single backstab, though they will probably die in the process.
Gargoyles are pretty nice units: they're inexpensive, can fly, and have high attack, defense, and health. They do, however, fall easy prey to catapults and dragons, which are two things you should have a lot of.
Trolls have high health and regenerate some of it every turn. However, they take so much damage and deal so little that this bonus never really comes into play.
Rogs (some sort of crazy-eyed frog monster) are highly unspectacular units with low attack and defense. On the other hand, they are inexpensive and amphibious, and also fairly effective at killing ships (though ships can outrun the rogs).
Ogres are another unit with high attack, defense, and health, with the added bonus of being able to attack from one space away. Dragons make short work of them.
Phantoms are a dragon's best friend. While weak in combat, they automagically scare all enemy units (dragons and other phantoms have immunity) up to three spaces away, fully halving the damage they do. A single phantom can turn the tide of a battle if a spy or dragon can't kill it off fast enough.
Wizards are expensive, have long attack range and high defense, but have low attack and health. Better use for them are for their spells: far sight, teleportation, and fireball.
Dragons have high attack power against all except a few units. Coupled with good defense, ability to fly, high mobility, and exceptional health, a single dragon can take and dish out a lot of punishment before going down. But no, it doesn't stop there; dragons get the bonus ability of attacking two units at once if they inhabit the same space (which goes if the dragon engages two enemy units in melee as well.)

Now that you can plainly see that dragons are best and trolls are worthless (goes for outside the game as well), you should have no problem winning any battles, should you decide to play this.

Not that you have to. I mean, it is pretty old.